WITHOUT YOU

When they say the internet has given us too much information at our fingertips, perhaps they had Harry Nilsson and Without You in mind. It was released during my junior year of high school on every radio station at all hours of the day and night, eventually rising to everyone’s Number One in early 1972 and winning that year’s Grammy for Best Male Pop Vocal Performance. Opening with an unforgettable piano intro before Harry Nilsson’s sorrowful voice begins.

No, I can’t forget this evening or your face as you were leaving,
but I guess that’s just the way the story goes. 

The song was everywhere even as Nilsson, Brooklyn-born and concert-shy, was not. Labeled by Paul McCartney as “the killer song of all time”, it was the perfect wailing plaint for this 16 year-old dreaming of love, the ultimate declaration of commitment.

I can’t live if living is without you,
I can’t live, I can’t give anymore. 

As serious as serious gets. Real love in the face of apparent loss.

I mostly missed out on Harry Nilsson then and am only finding him now, more than a quarter century after his fatal heart attack at 53. With the internet and all the fleshing out of anything it offers, there is the good and the bad. For most of my life, the song itself was enough. Every time I heard that spare but simple piano opening, I was in awe of this ballad, dwelling on the beautiful flow, that piano, Nilsson’s voice, the powerful chorus, and the overwhelming power of love whether found or lost.

Only now am I learning that the song was a rarity for Harry Nilsson, a hit written by someone else. Pete Ham and Tom Evans of Badfinger had collaborated across time and space. Ham had written If It’s Love, some very good lyrics in search of a chorus which he later located in bandmate Evans’ I Can’t Live. In one of the more dramatic examples of the whole is just so much bigger than the sum of the parts, the combination of the two works in progress worked, if not for Badfinger which released it on 1970’s No Dice (a version missed by yours truly and pretty much everyone else). Adding Gary Wright’s piano, Harry’s voice, an orchestra, and world-class production a year later was the difference maker. Ham recalled: “As soon as we heard it, we knew that was the way we wanted to do it but never had the nerve…Nilsson’s version really showed what you can do with a song, production-wise, and with a good singer. It blew me away.” Two decades later, Mariah Carey’s powerful cover sparked interest for a new generation. That’s the good news.

The bad is mostly about Badfinger, a group influenced by The Beatles and signed to their Apple Records, a band that might have been more aptly named Badkarma, Badfortune, or Badnews. Their George Harrison produced hit ballad Day After Day (“...looking out from my lonely room, day after day, bring it home, baby, make it soon, I give my love to you…”), theme song for stalkers No Matter What (“…no matter what you do, I will always be around, won't you tell me what you found girl, ooh girl want you, knock down the old grey wall, be a part of it all…”) and Paul McCartney composition and open invitation Come and Get It (“…if you want it, here it is, come and get it, but you better hurry ‘cause it’s going fast…”) still resonate after all these years but bad management, bad decisions and bad luck killed the good band. Not Ham and Evans though; they killed themselves. Ham in 1975, Evans eight years later, both by hanging, both upset over money and royalties, much of which would have derived from Without You. Ham, broke and 28 years old, left a note: “[Manager] Stan Polley is a soulless bastard. I will take him with me.”

Harry Nilsson passed in 1994. When one recalls his debut as a singer on Hoyt Axton’s Everybody’s Talkin’ (“…everybody’s talking at me, I don’t hear a word they’re saying…”) from Midnight Cowboy; learns that he wrote One (“…one is the loneliest number that you’ll ever do, two can be as bad as one, it’s the loneliest number since the number one…”) that Three Dog Night made famous in 1969; smiles along with Spaceman (“…bang, bang, shoot ‘em up destiny, bang, bang, shoot ‘em to the moon…”), Me and My Arrow (“…me and my arrow, straighter than narrow, wherever we go, everyone knows, it’s me and my arrow…”), Coconut (“…she put the lime in the coconut, she drank ‘em both up, she put the lime in the coconut, she called the doctor, woke him up…”), I Guess the Lord Must Be in New York City (“…I’ll say goodbye to all my sorrow, and by tomorrow, I’ll be on my way…”), and (his friend Randy Newman’s) Sail Away (“…in America you'll get food to eat, you won't have to run through the jungle and scuff up your feet, you'll just sing about Jesus and drink wine all day, it's great to be an American…”); listens to the hyper Gotta Get Up (“…gotta get up, gotta get out, before the morning comes…”) and anthem Let the Good Times Roll (“…c'mon baby, let the good times roll, c'mon baby, let me thrill your soul, c'mon baby you're the best there is, roll all night long…”) from his Nilsson Schmillson LP masterwork; and revels in the joy he expressed with Over the Rainbow and other classics in his standards album A Little Touch of Schmilsson in the Night, we know his passing was sadly way too early. Same can be said for Pete Ham and Tom Evans. We’ve all gone on living without them, thankful for what they left behind.

*********

NOTE: In researching this piece, I came across a terrific online music magazine Elsewhere. I plan to check out more of it when I have the time. https://www.elsewhere.co.nz/somethingelsewhere/6654/badfinger-and-harry-nilsson-without-them-no-without-you/